To give you a feel for these localities, when we arrived at Hawkesbury River Station, a young dude was leaping down the stairs towards the platform yelling out "Wait up, wait up!" to the train guard. Sure, that's perfectly normal, no one wants to miss their train. But then he stopped at a Mount Franklin vending machine and tried (unsuccessfully, I'll note) to buy some water for his trip. Meanwhile four hundred people on the train are waiting for this genius to realise the station staff was telling him, "It doesn't work, mate."
At the other end is Cowan, a suburb of literally six streets and a boatyard. If you went into the middle of all these streets you could certainly scream something that the entire village could hear. Though their congenital defects almost certainly affect their hearing, so you'd have to scream it from a dirt bike. There was a group of four walkers hanging out at the station there. They stared at us a lot and never walked anywhere.
And you thought Berowra was bad! Just go a few minutes north!
Anyway, we started our walk up a fairly decent hill to what Dave assured us was the perfect photo spot. We never found this spot, hence you will have to imagine the trees, ocean and boats (which were possibly from the Cowan boatyard) all by yourselves. We set off with another group of three walkers, who seemed suspiciously nice and were almost certainly religious missionaries of some variety.
When we reached Brooklyn Dam, Dave took us on a shortcut. We crossed out the other end, turned left, and there were the religious missionaries heading towards us. Weird, because we were going towards the same destination. One party was headed in the wrong direction. We had a brief ponderance as to where we should really be going, then Dave took us up a rocky little creekbed which looked suspiciously like the unpath. The missionaries stood on the fire trail at the bottom of this path, looking dubiously up at us as we ascended. Dave had managed to very quickly kill our credibility and they didn't follow us up this shortcut, hence were left in our wakes and never caught us up mu ha ha!
The walk itself was fairly hilly but 8 Big Toes managed to knock it off in record time, completing approx 12kms in less than 3h, which is a solid pace for a tough track. There were none of the rivers from our first walk and the only real obstacle was a tree which had recently fallen across the path, which we had to clamber over.
Onwards to glory, and may the next walk be longer and tougher.
Pete, on behalf of
Team 8 Big Toes
Here is the GPS tracking of our adventure:
http://www.endomondo.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment